Thirty-Four
THIRTY-FOUR
Mia
BEING SPIT-ROASTED helplessly on two cocks was a little bit terrifying, yet somehow the uncertainty and loss of control wasn’t doing a thing to stop my passage from dripping slick and clenching convulsively with every rough thrust from Byron.
I should have been gagging whenever Luca’s dick hit the back of my throat... and I did, the first couple of times. But my body felt like it was made of Jell-O after all the orgasms I’d had already. It needed to be taken, adjusting quickly to the feel of penetration from both directions.
Byron was doing all the work. I just had to take it. I wanted to take it.
Gradually, my death grip on Luca’s thigh relaxed. A deeply buried part of my brain uncoiled, and somehow it didn’t matter that I had tears in my eyes and drool on my chin. I was pleasing my mates and being pleased in return—taking sweet revenge on Luca for the heights he’d driven me to earlier... reveling in the strong hands pressing finger-shaped bruises into my hips from behind.
Beneath me, Luca was coming apart at the seams. I couldn’t imagine what it must feel like to have someone go down on you while also clamping around a knot the size of that insane dildo.
Apparently, it felt pretty good. Luca’s breathing had grown ragged, the sound perilously close to dry sobs. Byron’s hips snapped forward, a barely audible growl rumbling in his chest in counterpoint to my choked moans.
Every thrust drove me higher. The sensation building inside me felt completely different than what Luca had wrung from me with his fingers and mouth. It grew and grew, burrowing deeper into me instead of exploding outward. My mating gland ached with unexpected ferocity, throbbing its unrequited yearning along my nerves.
My moans grew high-pitched and desperate around Luca’s hard flesh. The thigh muscles under my hand trembled.
“Mia,” Luca’s voice was barely recognizable past the buzzing in my ears. “I—I’m going to—”
One of the hands holding my hips let go, sliding up the length of my spine to grasp me by the nape of the neck. Byron pushed me down until Luca was as deep as he could go.
“Suck him hard, pet,” Byron ordered, a bark creeping into his voice.
I held my breath and hollowed my cheeks as the alpha rocked into me with a devastating roll of his hips. Luca cried out and convulsed, little spurts of salty fluid rolling over the back of my tongue and sliding down my throat as Byron pumped into me with fast, ragged strokes.
As though Luca’s climax had completed some kind of circuit within me, the pressure that had been building in my deepest hidden places erupted. I could feel myself squirting slick around Byron’s cock... hear myself making some kind of awful, broken noise around Luca’s softening erection in my mouth.
It was so all-encompassing . I didn’t know what to do with the feelings that ricocheted through my body—not just physical feelings, but emotional ones as well. I’d never felt this way during sex. Not ever .
My core knew what to do with those feelings, though. As Byron groaned and jerked out his release inside me, it clamped down, trapping his growing knot like a vise. Luca shuddered, oversensitive, and lifted my mouth away from his spent cock. He shifted around on the couch with a quiet hiss until I could rest my upper body more comfortably in his lap.
Honestly, my bones felt like they had liquefied at some point. I could have been lying on a bed of nails and it still would have felt comfortable. I spared a second’s thought for Byron, who was more or less stuck in place, standing at the end of the couch until our bodies released each other. Then Luca’s hands tugged the hair tie off of my ruined ponytail and started idly stroking his fingers through the freed strands.
At which point, I fell fast asleep, floating on a cloud of bliss.
I woke an unknown amount of time later to the sound of low voices.
“You two should go back to her room and get some sleep.” That was Byron. “Or your room. Whichever.”
“Right. ‘Cuz she can totally walk after that.” Luca sounded tired.
“Can you walk?” Byron asked.
“Dunno. Why would I want to?” A pause. “I can maybe make it across the room to your bed.”
A longer pause.
“This is a terrible idea,” Byron muttered.
“I’m drunk, and she’s passed out from endorphin overload.” Luca didn’t sound amused. “Pick her up and put her in the damned bed, Byron. We all have work in a few hours.”
And that was how I found myself being carried across the room to Byron’s sleeping alcove like a very relaxed sack of potatoes. Somehow, I ended up spooning Luca from behind while Byron lay at my back, a few careful inches separating us. At which point, I fell asleep again.
I only woke up once more during the night. But when I did, Byron had rolled over in his sleep and was pressing himself along my body like a second skin. His nose was buried in my neck, inches from my mating gland. I must have twitched in surprise—because he snorted awake, froze for an instant, and quickly rolled away from me.
I extricated myself from Luca with awkward movements and wriggled around to lie facing Byron instead. Luca snored on, dead to the world. The alpha’s gray eyes were luminous in the early morning darkness. He stared at me warily, probably hoping I’d fall asleep again so he wouldn’t have to acknowledge that he’d been blatantly cuddling me.
Maybe my brain hadn’t come back online yet, because a question that had been quietly burning in the back of my mind slipped past my lips.
“How did you get shot?”
It was none of my business. The question was incredibly personal, and probably traumatic as well. For a long moment, I thought he wouldn’t answer. After all, he hadn’t even wanted me staying in his room tonight. He definitely wouldn’t want me grilling him about his past.
“It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that all of us except Zalen came from gangs,” he said slowly.
I nodded. “Yes, I’d gathered that much.”
The silence stretched for a few more seconds.
“I was running with a crew up in Newport. A rival gang from Madison tried to move in on our territory. There was a firefight, but we ended up getting pinned down in a dead-end alley.”
I tried to imagine Byron in a gang... Byron with a gun, shooting at other people.
“Everyone else died,” he said quietly. “I didn’t. End of story.”
“Oh,” I said after a moment—the stupidest, most useless reaction imaginable to learning something like that about another person.
His shoulder moved in a half shrug, a darker silhouette against the gray of the room. “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes,” he said in a monotone.
I reached out and put a hand on his shoulder. He stiffened for a moment, but he didn’t shake the gesture off.
“I’m glad you’re still here,” I told him.
The next time I woke up, it was mid-morning, and I was alone. I blinked blearily in the cheerful light filtering through the blinds, feeling out the shape of my headache.
The bedclothes were such a tangle that the queen-sized mattress might as well have been a nest, even though nests weren’t really an alpha thing. A post-it note was stuck to Luca’s pillow, off-kilter and hanging on by a single corner after I must’ve disturbed it in my sleep.
Ugh , it read in spidery, slanted handwriting. Tequila, am I right? Byron left you some aspirin and a glass of water on the bedside table. We should probably talk tonight, sorry.
-Luca
xoxox
That was... ambiguous, to put it mildly. Between the ominous ‘ we should talk’ and the ‘ xoxox ’ at the end, I wasn’t sure if my sudden queasiness had more to do with the shots last night—or the prospect of having fucked up a new set of relationships before the dust had settled from my last fucked-up relationship.
I rolled over. Sure enough, aspirin and a tall glass of water with the tiny remains of melted ice cubes sat on the little table beneath the lamp. The fact that Byron had put them there felt... significant, somehow? I shook my head sharply, aware that I was acting like a teenager—trying to manifest telepathy so I could crawl inside other people’s heads and divine what they were feeling, rather than having to ask.
My head protested the sudden movement, but honestly, I wasn’t that badly off. I hadn’t drunk that much, after all. Indeed, when I rolled into a sitting position, my head wasn’t the source of the worst ache.
I winced at the tackiness between my legs, abruptly aware of how very badly I needed a shower.
After popping a couple of pills and washing them down, I went to transform myself back into a functioning member of society. The house was, as expected, empty except for me. I cleaned myself up, dressed, made whatever meal involved eating buttered toast at ten a.m., and reflected that it might be kind of nice to have a friendly cat around for company in this huge place.
I was oddly excited about visiting the Hope Project next Monday and meeting Princess the cat, who’d somehow managed to wriggle her way past Emiel’s ten-foot-thick emotional walls. The nasty voice that whispered self-destructive things in my ear murmured, ‘ Sure, if they still want you to come... if Luca and Byron don’t decide you should leave after what happened last night .’
I stomped the voice down. ‘ We should talk’ signed with hugs and kisses did not equate with summary eviction from my new living arrangements. If anything, the conversation might be more along the lines of ‘ hey, having sex was a mistake, maybe we shouldn’t do that again .’
Given everything else going on in my life, it probably had been a mistake. For that reason, I couldn’t exactly protest, if that was what Luca wanted. My mind chose that instant to flash back to crashing pleasure and warm bodies tangled together in the dark—which was the polar opposite of helpful.
So, rather than dwell on things, I left for the restaurant a bit early. Nat had already beat me there. He tipped his chin up in greeting when I poked my head into the back office, but he didn’t look up from the pile of papers he was shuffling. He still looked like he hadn’t slept properly in a week.
I left him to it, heading off to check inventory and start the day’s prep. The other employees trickled in, getting everything ready in the familiar dance between front and back of house.
I was relieved to find that we were rocking a pretty decent lunch crowd after the first couple of hours. I’d just managed to convince myself that maybe the slow days were finally behind us when the sturdy, overhead metal rack we used to hang pots and pans in the center of the kitchen area collapsed on Shani’s head as she was reaching for a clean skillet.